The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Published 2010 · 780 pages · 200,000 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · History, Journalism & Reportage, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is The Warmth of Other Suns to read?
The Warmth of Other Suns scores 21 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Accessible narrative vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 25 out of 100
- Concrete personal narratives with social analysis.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with biographical detail and historical analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Three interweaving biographical threads.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Migration as quest for freedom.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Empathetic but clear-eyed about the North's failures.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Migration provided freedom but not equality.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Three interweaving biographies spanning decades.
How The Warmth of Other Suns is regarded
The Warmth of Other Suns holds a literary regard score of 55 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.